Life lessons from the cricket field

Rohit Mahajan

Paddy Upton  — sports scientist, fitness trainer, mental coach, philosopher — is thoroughly equipped to deconstruct both body and mind. But Upton prefers mind over body, so he chooses to deconstruct the mind — he goes for the heart: The vulnerabilities and weaknesses of human beings, including very successful cricketers. He gave up the job of fitness trainer to possibly the fittest team in cricket, the South Africans of the 1990s, to go on a journey of self-discovery, backpacking barefoot across Southeast Asia for six months. 

On return to his native South Africa, he “learned to wear shoes again” — becoming a nobody in the backpacking subculture of Southeast Asia, where no one knew cricket and him, or cared about his name or nationality, had cured him of his desire for what is usually perceived as success. For him, possessing a kind heart seems to have become the new definition of success. 

In 2007, such a man was needed by the Indian cricketers, who’d just had a strong dose of Greg Chappell — a genius with the bat but, by most accounts, dictatorial and manipulative as coach, certainly not the possessor of a kind heart.

One night in a dangerous part of Cape Town, Upton came upon a man called Horrendous in the act of murdering his girlfriend with a knife. On spotting Upton, Horrendous turned his knife on him and told him he was going to die, too. Then something incredible happened — such stuff is mostly part of religious mythology — Upton looked straight into the heart of his murderer and saw incredible pain in it — he opened his arms to him. Horrendous dropped the knife and embraced him. Horrendous had endured untold horror as a child, and that crazy encounter with the sage-like Upton changed him.

Such is the man who has written this book, and it indeed is filled with kindness and intelligence and insight. He blends the ideas that cliché has rooted in East and West — brought up on the ‘measurables’ of “cause-and-effect” in the West, he deals with the impossible-to-measure mind, and notes that “in the East, there is far more acceptance of the intangible, the unseen, and the cyclical nature of life”. “Someone from the western world could easily dismiss or disregard that as an esoteric, touchy-feely way of thinking. You see western coaches and players do this in the IPL from time to time,” he writes. He notes that it can be a “big error to dismiss someone’s intuitions and beliefs and the energy they create”.

Upton managed to help several Indian players, and is credited — along with MS Dhoni — with helping the team remain calm in an absolutely cricket-frenzied India during the home World Cup win in 2011.

Upton takes himself very seriously, which is good because it is such people who are most likely to write intelligent, helpful stuff for individuals going through difficult times. He’s also aware that not everyone is keen about deep talk — and notes, with humour, how Dhoni, then captain of the ODI team (Anil Kumble was the Test captain) told him, in a very gentle manner, to consider not speaking “always”. 

Dhoni was a remarkably different sort of leader, and Upton relates an interesting anecdote: Test team captain Kumble proposed a fine of Rs 10,000 for any player/staff who was late for a team meeting or the team bus; ODI captain Dhoni proposed that if a player was late, “every single person should be fined Rs 10,000”. Upton says he was never concerned about being late for the Test team, and would pay up, but “I was never late with the one-day side, since my being late would also impact other people's pockets”. Dhoni magnified the guilt of the late-comer many times. That’s genius.

This book is full of such nuggets, apart from great life lessons, most of them useful for a thinker who also is a doer, or wants to be one.